RICERCA ITALIANA     

Research program

Exchanges, the interaction of persons, the circulation of cultural models and symbolic interferences in religious, political and social life. Studies on Religious Orders in the late Middle Ages and in the Early Modern Age in Italy.

University Co-ordinator

Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore - STUDI MEDIOEVALI, UMANISTICI E RINASCIMENTALI - ()

Research Unit Leader

Giancarlo Andenna

Description

While the most of historiography on Mendicant Orders is built upon the implicit postulate of a contrast between spirituality and institutions, in this study we will take into consideration the religious orders and more generally the forms of the religious life itself because these constitute an excellent “acid test” in comparing the Communal world on one hand and the world of friars and monks on the other, with regard to their institutions. If by institution we mean a social construction founded on the communication of rules and values as well as on the realisation of guide-lines which have the function of guaranteeing duration and legitimacy, it is easier to follow a perspective that overcomes the traditional ontologistic view of institutions, based on the tacit equivalence between institutions and organisations, to be projected toward the analysis of those institutionalising attitudes that the religious used to guarantee continuity and perpetuity to their initiatives and that communal institutions adopted with analogues purposes. These attitudes concerned both the elaboration of guiding principles, that is, the ideals that individuals and communities wanted to put into practice, and the constitution of practical instruments for the realisation of those ideals.
In particular, the normative dimension revealed itself to be essential, because in the passage from rule to customs and finally to statutes we can observe that an ideal patrimony gathered into a text (the rule) was followed by two different phases of setting the law in writing, one of them aimed at crystallising a posteriori the praxis of the daily life of the communities in the consuetudines, the other aimed at projectively fixing, through statutes, new forms of regulation of that same life. The dimension of historicity in these processes is of the greatest importance because each institutional change was interpreted and proposed as an element of continuity denying its procedural nature through the elaboration of historical tales that testify to the perfect conformity of the contemporary experience with the original ideals of the founder or founders of the institutions. The relationship between institutional dimension and historicity will therefore be considered along the perspective of the Geltungsgeschichten, that is, of those reconstructions of the past that guaranteed, internally and despite the procedural nature of the historical existence of institutions, both civic and ecclesiastical, changes that constituted its ineliminable product. The connection between duration and change will be taken up as the interpretation key for the forms of communication and of structural articulation that the organisations put into effect to become stable through mechanism of auto-legitimisation. In that perspective the Geltungsgeschichten, with their double nature, constitutive and conservative, aimed, on one hand to produce, on the other to maintain validity, and it is exactly for this reason that they represent an excellent indicator in evaluating the level of stability of institutions. This involves an effort of self-representation that corresponds to the needs of the historical period in which the Geltungsgeschichten were elaborated; and these intents are today more important than the committment to serenely and objectively searching for the origins of these same institutions. The
theme of symbolism related to the communicative dimension of religious orders and to their propaganda will also be central in this research.
Particular attention will be paid to the processes of symbol exchange that took place among the two fields, religious and civil, and the interferences, possible only through the use of the same symbolic images, assigned, however, totally opposite meanings. Clearly it will be necessary to distinguish between first level symbols, such as the crown, the crosier, the sceptre and the mitre, and second level ones, such as the contruction of buildings that embody the institutions and
make them visible and longlasting, guaranteeing their stability; or the creation of organizational and governamental structures, such as the general chapters and the "definors" of the religious orders, or the general councils and the smaller councils of the town sages.
This research will be centred on cases from Northern-central Italy, and in particular of Lombardy, with the intention of gathering any interference between the dimension of “institutionality” in the world of monks and in the cultural and political universe of city comuni. We will use a geographical and political concept of “Lombardy” that is much broader than that corresponding to the actual talian region of the same name: between the 12th and 13th centuries Lombardy extended not only to the territories between Mincio to the East and Sesia to the West, with the cities of Vercelli, Novara, Milano, Como, Bergamo, Lodi, Pavia, Alessandria, Tortona, Cremona and Brescia, but also beyond the Po, from Piacenza to Parma, Reggio and Modena. This study intends to clarify the relationships, to date never investigated in Italy, between the political and cultural world of the Lombard Comuni and the religious one of the monastic and hermitic orders (abbeys, priorates, domus) and of the mendicant orders communities. The institutions and institutional forms that regulated urban politics will be compared to the religious structures of monks and friars. Specific attention will be given to reciprocal exchanges between the lay culture and the monastic and mendicant one, with particular regard to the various ways of communicating, found both in political speeches and in the various forms of preaching. Various phases of rationalisation, which found in the processes of composition and writing their privileged form of expression, may emerge from the comparison. For the evaluation of the forms of interference between the production and spread of cultural, ethical and behavioural models on the part of the religious orders and of the communal institutions, various prevalent indicators will be determined: the forms of production and conservation of documents, the relationships between the preaching of religious orders and political oratory, the value systems that the religious orders infused into Italian communal society through documents and public communication. Since the 11th century, religious orders in Italy perfected forms of conservation of documents (the “cartulari”) which gave preference to the book as a container of texts able to make the documentation pertinent to an institution more easily accessible. A similar rationalisation of archival resources represented the pre-requisite for the full retrieval of the rights and goods of the monasteries, which had been subjected to repeated processes of dispersion. The effectiveness of the book format as a container of documents was also exploited by the Episcopal chancelleries which prepared registers similar to the monastic “cartulari”. These books with both monastic and Episcopal documents served as models for the Libri iurium of the Italian Comuni, which gradually transferred its documentation as it was produced. Particular forms of historiographic writing developed from both the monastic cartulari and the Libri iurium of the Comuni, such as the chronicles with documents of some monasteries and the city annals kept by the notaries who worked for the Comuni of Northern-central Italy. Even the archived of unbound parchments, both monastic and communal, should not be overlooked. Of these we shall study, always from a comparative viewpoint, the internal structure and the rules that directed the selection and sedimentation of archival material. The book, both for the religious orders and for the communal authorities, represented an instrument with which to put into writing the set of rules that regulated the life of the institutions (customs, constitutions, statutes, capitular acts, etc.). We will compare the monastic and communal processes for the material production of these books in relation to the functioning of the organisms to which religious orders and urban collectives entrusted the task of defining their legislative heritage. The personnel in charge of handling public deeds was in large part drawn from the class of notaries both in monastic circles and in communal ones. A possible object of study is the use of these documentation professionals within more or less developed chancelleries. However, the topic of the circulation of experience and institutional models in relation to the circulation of monks among the various convents and monasteries remains to be investigated. Their assistance to communal institutions was realised in various forms, besides the production and conservation of documents, beginning with interventions as mediators in the struggles within the cities and among cities. These are essential occasions for understanding the value systems that the religious orders infused into the Italian communal society. The investigation will be about particular episodes that involved the intervention of monks and friars in the resolution of controversies and conflicts in the attempt to determine the guiding principles of such interventions and the specific circumstances that made them possible.
In order to better delineate the concrete reality of the 11th to 15th centuries, in which the processes described here were carried out, attention will be concentrated on ruling noble social groups (comites, milites, capitanei, valvassores) and on the development of the class of cives and populares. We will investigate how and for what reasons individuals, belonging to homogeneous clans, chose the rural politic institutions (signorie di banno, castle dominations, rural comuni) and the religious institutions of monastic or heremitical stamp of the countryside. At the same time it will be useful to understand how other individuals, belonging to the same families or to others urban lineages, preferred the political and institutional forms of cities (consules, consules iusticie, potestates) and the ecclesiastical structures, monastic or mendicants, operating in the cities or in the vicinity of the walls of the towns in the communal period (umiliati, Preachers, Augustinian, Franciscan, Carmelite, dolciniani, trinitari, giovanniti). We will look at this process its opposite dimension too: we will question how the different political and monastic/religious choices of individuals could influence the evolution, positive or negative, of the houses, of the clans, or even of the communal society of the cities itself.
Moreover the problem should also be examined in relation to the incipient political forms of the urban power of the big comuni of “Lombardia”. In the comparison of the various urban and rural ecclesiastical orders, in parallel with the strong evolution of the economy of the cities in relation to the crisis of the rural comuni, increasingly overburdened with the taxes imposed by the cities, the problem of debts connected to high interest loans to usury will emerge. Beginning in the middle of 13th century, documentation indicates a consistent indebtedness of rural comuni, in parallel with a similar indebtedness of the traditional monastic orders such as the cluniacensi, vallombrosani, the cistercenses themselves and sometimes the umiliati. To obviate the difficulties occasionally the communal councils intervened, but only for urban institutions: in their acts money concessions, sometimes conspicuous, were registered to the advantage of the religious orders operating in the urban territory, particularly in charitabley and hospital activity, in order to assure the continuation of services indispensable to the life of the urban society.
This research will be based on printed documentation to date, but since for medieval “Lombardia” there are not many historical sources, it will be necessary to carry out systematical archival investigations on the parchment resources of the religious orders, conserved in the Archivi di Stato, and on archives of the municipalities. The documentation found will be presented, besides in digital format, also in print in specific Italian and foreign specialised periodicals.